ZPEnergy.com - Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated con

Titles sent to me by anon with a comment that the research is much more advanced today: Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors

Robert L. Forward* Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California 90265 and Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, Edwards Air Force Base, California 93523

Any pair of conducting plates at close distances (< micron) experience an attractive Casimir force that is due to the electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations of the vacuum. A "vacuum-fluctuation battery" can be constructed by using the Casimir force to do work on a stack of charged conducting plates. By applying a charge of the same polarity to each conducting plate, a repulsive electrostatic force will be produced that opposes the Casimir force. If the applied electrostatic force is adjusted to be always slightly less than the Casimir force, the plates will move toward each other and the Casimir force will add energy to the electric field between the plates. The battery can be recharged by making the electrical forces slightly stronger than the Casimir force to reexpand the foliated conductor.

©1984 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v30/p1700 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.30.1700
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Surface Plasmon Modes and the Casimir Energy

F. Intravaia and A. Lambrecht Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel UPMC/ENS/CNRS case 74, Campus Jussieu, F75252 Paris CEDEX 05, France

We show the influence of surface plasmons on the Casimir effect between two plane parallel metallic mirrors at arbitrary distances. Using the plasma model to describe the optical response of the metal, we express the Casimir energy as a sum of contributions associated with evanescent surface plasmon modes and propagative cavity modes. In contrast to naive expectations, the plasmonic mode contribution is essential at all distances in order to ensure the correct result for the Casimir energy. One of the two plasmonic modes gives rise to a repulsive contribution, balancing out the attractive contributions from propagating cavity modes, while both contributions taken separately are much larger than the actual value of the Casimir energy. This also suggests possibilities to tailor the sign of the Casimir force via surface plasmons.

©2005 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v94/e110404